Dignified `Secret Rapture' offers a peek into the Britain of the '80s

October 10, 2002|By Chris Jones, Tribune arts reporter.

In an era when it often seems like only Tony Kushner dares to write ideologically engaged dramas, the great English playwright David Hare has consistently seen the lives of individuals through a societal prism.

Many playwrights view families as moral absolutes -- and love and sex merely as romantic impulses. But for more than 30 years, Hare has written plays wherein the personal is always political.

It's perhaps ironic -- if understandable -- that "The Secret Rapture" is among the most often produced of Hare's works. That's certainly the case in Chicago, where nary a season goes by without a production of Hare's most personal play.

Yet the piece often is justly viewed in Hare's native England as one of his less successful dramas. It's perceived by many as too close to an Edwardian society drama, in which a suit-wearing Margaret Thatcher stand-in presides over a series of tortured family crises.

But the enemies of political dramatists are cultural specificity and the ticking clock. Thus theaters worry that many of Hare's best dramas ("The Absence of War" or "Pravda") either will seem too British for an American audience or appear dated, or both. Since "Rapture" is about the clashes between two internally wound-up and recently bereaved sisters, and their young, alcoholic stepmother, it's reasonably perceived as both universal and timeless, even though it was intended as Hare's indictment of what he saw as Thatcher's compassion-free Britain in the late 1980s.

Thankfully, even second-tier Hare is better than most authors' best work. And James Bohnen's current production of "The Secret Rapture" for his Remy Bumppo Theatre Company is such a simple, tightly focused and beautifully crafted production, it becomes a rewarding night of theater that emphasizes the depth and ambiguity buried in a play that can easily be broken.

Bohnen typically casts very well -- and his "Rapture" wisely employs Susan Bennett and Kati Brazda, two talented but lesser known young Chicago actresses who are transitioning to bigger companies but retain enough off-Loop insouciance to give their work freshness and bite.

Bennett's take on the personally awry Katherine is dignified, vulnerable and believable. And Brazda has enough of a halting, self-doubting presence that this version of the do-gooder Isobel is vulnerably empathetic rather than unbearably righteous.

As the Thatcherite Marion, poster child for familial neglect, Laura Fisher offers the requisite bluster but stays on the right side of archetype. And in a play where all males are pontificating hypocrites, both Nick Sandys and Kevin Fox offer dignified, arresting, credible work without resorting to any of the obvious choices.